We give everyone 30 days of free trial. If Paperpile is not the product for you, you can choose not to buy it. What we promise to our customers can be seen here: https://paperpile.com/features
While not perfect (who’s perfect?), we deliver a very feature rich product and we’ve seen thousands of users switching to Paperpile this year alone.
On this forum, we share parts of our roadmap and from time to time the current state of things. We also do invite some users to early betas. I won’t change this policy because I think it makes sense even though it apparently leads to wrong expectations some times.
I’ve been absent from the forums for a while because I was actually working on hiring new people and growing our team to implement many of the things discussed here in the forum. It’s a bit sad of course to come back to this discussion being called “chronically under-delivering”.
But I’m afraid there is not much we can do about it. We work with more people on more new products/features than ever and even if we ship all these things we have in the pipeline there will be disappointed users because we did no address everything raised here.
I hope I will have more time to address specific issues like the searching problems in more detail soon.